


if teardrops could be bottled, there'd be swimming pools filled by models

by lavenderss



Category: Elite (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fashion & Models, Alternate Universe - Photographer, Carla and Lu have a strained friendship what's new, Eating Disorders, F/M, You'll probably cringe, idk anything about the modeling industry so i'm sorry if you do
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:27:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26706733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lavenderss/pseuds/lavenderss
Summary: “He's staring at you,” Lu informs her loudly.Carla can't even sigh, because that would force one of the pins stuck in her skirt to slide right through the soft skin of her waist. “Who?” she tries to play dumb.“The photographer,” Lu rolls her eyes.OR: A slightly hypocritical pretentious jerk who takes pictures makes Carla believe in love and happiness again.
Relationships: Carla Rosón Caleruega/Samuel García Domínguez, mentions of Guzmán/Nadia
Comments: 18
Kudos: 49





	if teardrops could be bottled, there'd be swimming pools filled by models

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pentaghastly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pentaghastly/gifts).
  * Inspired by [little fires everywhere](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23299693) by [pentaghastly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pentaghastly/pseuds/pentaghastly). 



> This has been in my drafts since forever (I mean, MONTHS), and I literally don't even know why I wrote thirteen thousand words of this kinda inconsistent pretentiously deep mess, but here you go. Credits to @pentaghastly and the work _little fires everywhere_ , because as you'll see, this is heavily inspired in about every aspect (although this is about 34567x less well thought of). Anyway, I don't know. It's very long. Just - go on reading.  
> (Title is from a song by Billie Eilish, of course. I'm embracing the essence of what this fic is instead of fighting it.)  
> Also, yes, I am posting this at three in the morning, I do have school tomorrow and my German homework isn't done. I _don't_ know how I got here.

**i.**

Carla's been in this business for too long to not have encountered a handful of perverted photographers.

The kind that stare at you a second longer than necessary, and stop at your chest and butt for a clearly different reason than estimating the cup size that would need to fit under the next impractically extravagant dress, made out of plastic or whatever, because it's _fashion_.

When she was thirteen and she started with this thing, she found it a bit scary. Now, they're just pitiful.

The one that's staring at her from the selection committee for the GUESS campaign isn't the same as the others, though.

He stares at her face.

Since it is for a runway show, he should be much more interested in her body, but he is fixated on her eyes, emerald green. She tries desperately not to look into his, but even so, she feels them piercing.

Chocolate.

They have the decadent colour the one food that she absolutely can't have, and the same delicious richness, as it seems, and they're staring deep into her soul.

She would never admit it, but they scare her a little.

**ii.**

She finds out that she's a photographer, not any kind of highly-ranked executive for advertisment – how could he? He looks so young – two days later, when they're at a fitting for the runway show and he's taking backstage pictures. She doesn't pay much attention to him, because she can't – if she turned around her head and followed his flickering around the room, one of the weird needles that are stuck in her head piece would poke right through her skull.

“He's staring at you,” Lu informs her loudly.

Carla can't even sigh, because that would force one of the pins stuck in her skirt to slide right through the soft skin of her waist. “Who?” she tries to play dumb.

“The photographer,” Lu rolls her eyes, very aware of the fact that Carla is also very aware.

Carla doesn't say anything.

“Don't tell me you're gonna let him charm you with that artist-vibe,” Lu continues, her voice blaring across the whole room.

“Of course not,” Carla doesn't move her head, nor a muscle on her face, except for the tiny slit between her lips. Because of course not. A model and a photographer – what a horrendous cliché.

**iii.**

There's a new girl at the agency that gets sent to the same castings as them, and Lucrecia isn't at all pleased with the turn of events. It is understandable; Nadia is dark-skinned. If the casting directors need a splash of colour and culture and variety, they're more likely to pick the curly-haired, skinny, taller new-face than Lu.

Still, Carla thinks that retorting to _ripping her dress_ before the runway show is a bit too telenovela-like. Nadia goes on though, not saying anything, just pinching the fabric together with a bobby pin. The dress has so many folds that it's not even noticeable.

Lu puts a rumour into circulation about Nadia sleeping with the casting director; nobody really cares. Lu sneaks into the agent's office and takes out Nadia's portfolio from the folder of prospective candidates for an upcoming Swarowski campaign; Nadia still shows up at the casting.

Lu talks a hole into Carla's head about how malicious, selfish and relentless Nadia is, and Carla doesn't say a word. Her gaze is fixed on the photographer taking pictures of the girls in the first round, for comparison before callbacks.

“Carla, are you listening to me?” Lu snaps, and Carla forces herself to turn her head and ignore her conscience, which is telling her to yell at Lu to stop, because Nadia is literally three meters away, and she looks as if she's about to cry.

**iv.**

Carla gets a callback and Lu doesn't. She books the job and Lu tries very hard to pretend that she's happy for her, which Carla appreciates, because after the excruciating selection process that has left her absolutely drained, she definitely doesn't need to listen to Lu throwing a fit.

When she comes to the shoot two days later, she doesn't text Lu that Nadia is there, as she promised she would, were it the case.

She changes into her outfit and lets people put jewellery on her, and her gaze travels across the room, but of course, there isn't a need for a documenting photographer today – it isn't a casting, it's the real thing.

She'd be lying if she said that she isn't impressed when she sees him taking the actual pictures for the campaign. He's been everywhere where she's been for the past few weeks, but he surprises her here. It's a high-profit campaign, billboards at public transport stops across a few countries kind of thing. Not a thing that a twenty-year old photographer who normally only takes working pictures would do.

She feels his gaze on herself the whole time, even through the lens of the camera. It is very hard for her to concentrate on her _I'm-so-much-better-looking-than-you-that-it's-aggravating_ face.

She's done and goes for a change in outfit, and she still feels the eyes on her back. It draws out like a line of melted chocolate, following each of her steps, and she can't decide whether she likes it or not.

There's something appealing about the horror of the two things she can't have fusing into one and pursuing her everywhere she goes.

**v.**

The first time he talks to her, his voice sounds just like she's imagined – deep, creamy, swirling the words around before he lets them out into space. “Hi. I've seen you around.”

She's sort of infatuated by his casualness – if photographers speak to models, it's either the young ones, unexperienced and largely obvious about what they want; or the old ones, experienced and gray, haired, overly polite and always on their tiptoes – none of them wants a scandal that from time to time captivates, in big block letters, newspaper titles: _Well-respected high-fashion photographer took advantage of tens of models, including minors._

Samuel doesn't fall into either of these categories – yes, Samuel, she heard someone call his name earlier. He asks her casually, as if they've met on the street, but it's not that pretentiously cool way that screams _I'm-an-artist-you're-hot-I-want-to-fuck-you_ the rest of the young photographers speak in. He sounds interested, but not overly.

She loves it.

But he's a photographer and she's a model, and she isn't willing to fall into the pit of pathetic cliché romances. “You must have seen me around. You stare at me nonstop,” she says coolly, tilting her head and letting her hair fall over her shoulder and cascade on her back. It's a low move, really – she exposes the whole curve of her neck to his eyes.

“You can't blame me for staring at you,” he says and Carla chuckles internally. Okay, maybe he isn't so subtle after all.

She's used to compliments on her looks – her job depends on them – so she finds it harder than it should be to divert the feeble smile from sounding in her voice or the rouge from flushing her cheeks. “I guess I can't. It's my job to be stared at.”

“I do it differently, though,” he observes, and Carla's whole body flutters as she agrees. On the inside, at least. On the outside, she limits herself to a gaze into his eyes – chocolate. Decadent and rich and with an undertone of caramel and maybe a pinch of chilli.

She could _eat him_ right there.

“If that wasn't clear, I stare at you because you're unique.”

Not beautiful. Unique. They're all beautiful – in a conservative way, which Carla falls into, _or_ in a _unique_ way – but she somehow knows that he isn't talking about _that_.

She shakes her head a little, because even though she's kind of flattered, she has to realize what he's doing – he's a photographer, a young and hot one, she's a model, a young and hot one, and this is probably just one of his pick up lines on which the oh-so-objectified-misunderstood-teenage-models stick like bees on honey.

But she wants to believe him. And so does her body, because her muscles twitch her head to force her to look into his eyes, and the whole thing happens again.

She decides that he deserves at least an ironic remark in response to his compliment and she tries to form one on her tongue, but Samuel beats her to it.

“It's sad, really.”

“What?”

“All of these girls, going around like they're fucking dress up dolls, perpetuating the vanity of this industry and the world, just for some sense of validation-” his eyes blend into hers, the dangerously warm dripping chocolate, and she decides she doesn't like it after all.

“You're the one who takes pictures of them,” she scoffs.

“Yeah,” he plays pensievely with the strap of the camera that's hanging from his neck. He doesn't say anything to revert the image of his hypocrisy that forms in Carla's head.

**vi.**

Carla holds Lucrecia's hair back as the brunette pushes two fingers down her throat and then back up, with a rhythmic precision only interrupted by the cramps of the clutching girl's body.

Chocolate is hard to puke.

It is the godforsaken Nadia's fault, of course, and it's not the two callbacks and the eventually booked job – that only one of the darker-skinned got, of course, and it doesn't take a genius to guess which – that caused Lucrecia to _fuck it_.

It is that when Carla and Lu and Nadia were leaving the agency yesterday, having a meeting about the organisation of the promo shoot for tomorrow's runway, the two of them stepped feet outside the glass building later than Nadia – Carla purposely stalling, of course, just to prevent that encounter.

When Carla saw Nadia on the stairs, kissing Guzmán, one of the most successful male models the agency represents, and incidentally also Lu's past fling, she turned to her best friend and finally understood why she hates Nadia _so much_.

Or, so she thought. But from the look on her friend's face, Carla realized that Lucrecia didn't even know.

So she's puking the remaints of her emotional binge into the toilet bowl, and Carla is carefully holding her already-styled hair back, because they're shooting in half an hour.

She wonders what it tastes like, the chunks of brown cocoa butter, sugar and stomach juices – without the stomach juices, of course. Carla knows the taste of those too well.

She grimly watches Lu wipe her mouth with toilet paper – thank god she hadn't gotten her make-up on yet – and whisper: “This is the last time.”

They both know that it isn't. Lucrecia is determined, of course, like anyone in the industry, but only until she breaks. She doesn't have the same type of determination that Carla has, that being, she doesn't.

Break.

_Ever._

Sometimes, when she's barely standing from a restrictive diet before a big shoot and she can hear her heart skip beats, Carla wonders where her tipping point is. Sometimes, she wonders whether she even has one.

**vii.**

He steps into the bathroom when they're trying to fix Lucrecia's reddened eyes by the mirror. The expression on his face makes it clear that he's heard everything, and he was only waiting for them to finish. Like he's some sort of chivalrous gentleman that doesn't want to embarrass Lu.

 _The audacity,_ Carla thinks.

Lu leaves the bathroom in fast steps, taking away the remaints of her pride displayed on her uplifted chin, and Carla stands in front of the mirror with the brown eyes of his reflection blaring with a crimson red undertone. They're the most vibrant thing in the sterilly white bathroom.

“She shouldn't do that,” he speaks. “And you shouldn't let her.”

His eyes, even over the mirror, are creating a deep hole in her soul.

“You're acting like it's not the daily bread around here.”

She is truly staggered by his naivety and by the fact that he actually seems impassioned, anger and sorrow mixing in his gaze.

“ _You_ don't do it.” He speaks quietly, but he's not asking, nor is he hesitating. Carla suddenly wants to rip his eyes out of the eyeholes if it meant that he'd stop staring at her. “But you let her.”

She feels a little bit bad when he leaves her alone in the bathroom, because she knows that he saw the manipulative and calculating side of her, which has correctly deduced that the puffy cheeks and brittle, yellow teeth that stem from her friend's bulimia eliminate one more out of the competition.

**viii.**

She finds him after the end of the shoot, her cheeks blaring with fury when she sees him carefully packing up his camera lenses, wrapping them in synthetically silky polyester cloths. “Who the fuck do you think you are to judge me? She would've made herself throw up anyways, so I'm sorry that I didn't want everyone to realize when she'd have puke on her messed up hair to embarras her and for everyone to see and make her lose jobs! I don't have the power to stop her! You think that you're all high-and mighty with your little speeches about vanity and beauty standards and validation, but you're the one who's perpetuating them by taking pictures of one starved teenager after another!”

Carla expects him to defend himself, as she would've done in case somebody snapped at her out of a sudden, coldly and impersonally. But he's not her, a cold emerald with cutting edges.

He's the boy with the chocolate eyes. She should've known better.

“You're right.” The left corner of his lip curls up almost unnoticeably. “I'm a dogmatic bigot.”

 _A pretentious one, too,_ Carla thinks upon his choice of vocabulary.

**ix.**

The second day of fashion week, Carla goes to the afterparty.

More than anything, she goes there to avoid having to return to the apartment Lu and her share, because judging by Lu's broken stare when she saw Nadia and Guzmán leaving together, she's not in the mood to go to the party and reinstate her dominance by playing another dirty trick on Nadia or flirt with a rebound, making sure Guzmán sees them leave (not that it worked any of the approximately twenty times before – Guzmán just _doesn't care_ ).

She's in the mood to eat and then puke, maybe chew and spit if she has that bit of control left; either way, Carla would like to keep the remaints of respect for her friend, which have started to deteriorate at an alarmingly fast rate ever since she saw her literally mix _Ensure plus_ into Nadia's protein shake.

It's not that she didn't know what kind of person Lucrecia was, it's just that it seems to have been unbearably evident lately. So she finds herself at the party, sipping vodka and diet cola, standing by the bar on a piedestal and her distant, overbearing gaze flickers condescendigly through the sea of thrashed sixteen-year olds and inevitably lands on a ruffle of brown hair.

She purses her lips when she sees Samuel talking to one of those pathetic _kids_ , clinging on his arm like a needy puppy, her eyes radiating the most annoying kind of longing even though Carla can't actually see them. She can sense it, though, and when she sees Samuel smile and take the girl to the dance floor, an overbearing surge of anger takes over her whole body.

“Wanna go dance?”

She turns around, her chin held high up, to see a dark-skinned boy with a fucking _hat_ on his head and an unreasonably confidently extended hand towards her. She is about to reject him, as she always does, impersonally like he isn't even worth a look, but something stops her.

“Sure,” she hears herself say, and she doesn't know whether it's the drink on an empty stomach apart from an apple in the morning, or the sight of Samuel idiotically spinning a screeching girl around, when she grinds on Yeray – she is somewhat impressed by herself for actually remembering his name – in the middle of the dance floor, right under Samuel's nose.

“You wanna take it to my place?”

Carla feels his eyes, dark, but not rich and deep – stupid and honest and obvious. Not decadent chocolate, just pure, refined caramelized sugar on a pan. Burnt.

The scoff she lets out is genuinely almost tender. She finds it peculiarly cute how naïve some boys can be.

But when he pulls her back by her wrist after seeing the clear roll of her eyes, she doesn't find his endearing nature even a tiny bit cute anymore. He is simply annoying; an obstacle.

“I thought we were having a nice time,” he says pressed close to her ear to make himself heard even over the extremely noisy pulsing beats. It almost breaks Carla's eardrum.

“You touch me again and I'll break your arm,” she whispers into his ear, sweetly dangerous and dangerously sweet, feels his fingers loosen around her wrist and doesn't even need to try to jerk away her hand with force.

“I'm- sorry,” he stutters, but she's already turned around, walking swiftly away from him.

She's be lying if she said that finding the sixteen-year old that Samuel was dancing with alone at the bar, drinking a hole into her not yet completely developed teenage brain, doesn't provide her with a silent sense of sick satisfaction.

**x.**

“Hey.”

Carla lifts her eyes from her makeup bag. She's looking for a moisturizer, because after removing around seven layers of makeup – the pile of cotton pads on the edge of the cosmetic counter is standing firm like the tower of Pisa – her skin needs a bit of a rejuvenation.

Her eyes meet Samuel's in the mirror, and she suddenly feels very aware that her countenance is stripped naked and laid out to him defencelessly.

She forgets to breathe for a second as his eyes, even over the mirror, seem to melt with hers.

Chocolate and fucking _spinach_. At least it corresponds with what they each had for lunch today.

“What are you doing here?” she questions coldly, her stare already returning to her makeup bag while her brain yells panicking curses at her for getting her makeup off in the common area and not the girls' bathroom. Not that he'd have a problem breaking in there, as his past actions have shown.

“I left my stuff here, like everyone,” he smiles slightly and gestures towards his bag on the floor, making Carla feel utterly embarrassed by her dumb, objectively unreasonable arrogance.

“Well, you got your things, but you aren't leaving, so I think my question is still in place.” She refuses to apply her moisturizer in front of him, to make herself all pale and sticky. Instead, she pulls out her mascara and draws out elegant waves.

He _chuckles_ and Carla almost stabs herself in the eye. “I'm talking to you, if you need such a pedantic answer.”

“Well,” she starts organizing her whole bag methodically, highlighter, mascara, primer, powder brush, just so that she has something to be occupied with and doesn't have time to stare at his reflection in the mirror and notice the tiniest details about the little wrinkles that form near his eyes when he smiles, “anything in particular you need?”

“Maybe,” she feels him shrugging his shoulders behind her, a miniature transfer of energy so palpable to her that she wonders whether he has some sort of telekinetic superpowers, “do you wanna hang out with me?”

His eyes are striking like knives cutting though the glass of the mirror and opening her whole, as she lifts up her head upon spilling the contents of her makeup bag over the whole counter by a rapid move of her hand.

**xii.**

He seems brazen with her rejection when he finds her after the photoshoot for the designer she walked for at fashion week. Without an invitation, he sits down next to her on the floor, leaning his back against the unreasonably big loudspeaker that is for whatever reason positioned in three quarters of the room.

“Aren't you supposed to be working?” she asks, eyeing him casually grubbing through his sports bag.

“Lunch break,” he explains cheerfully, taking out a plastic bag with apparently a sandwich wrapped in a paper towel and a Twix.

“Right.” Carla doesn't have anything to say, so she watches him eat, but she starts feeling very uncomfortable by his mere presence so close to her, crunching and putting his sandwich down and his arm seemingly moving closer towards hers between each bite. “You should ask them to pay you better so that you don't have to pack a snack like you're a ten-year old,” she blurts out, after he moves a bit too close and his fist witch a crumpled up napkin almost brushes against her thigh and her breathing starts to jag.

He laughs, brightly and easily, lacking the normal richness of his speaking voice. “Yeah. Maybe they should. But, after all, I'm just exploiting the vulnerability of starving teenagers, so maybe I'm being paid the right amount.”

Normally, when Carla doesn't speak, it is because she chooses to stay silent. She hopes that she's had enough experience with it that right now seems like such a case – _normal_ – and that it isn't visible on her that she is actually at a loss for words.

“You were right,” Samuel continues, turning his head to the side and examining her unmoving gaze profoundly. “I was wrong to invade your friend's privacy, and I had no right to _scold_ you or anything.” He bites his lower lip pensively, and Carla notices the little cut he has slightly on the left. “It's just that, taking pictures of the things that I'd _like_ to take pictures of pays even worse, and I'm not exactly in the position to be able not to take jobs for money.”

“You must be really good at exploiting vulnerable models, cause I've seen you on almost every job I've had for the past month,” Carla observes carefully, her gaze flickering hesitantly between Samuel's arm bent over his pulled up knee and his eyes. The second she makes contact with the latter, she sees them light up because of her joke on live, and her lip involuntarily curls up into a smile.

“I could exploit happy wedding couples or, I don't know, puppies for dog food commercials, and I'd probably be a bit less morally compromised, but I haven't sunk that deep yet,” he shakes his head, grinning. “But, I don't know. Maybe overpricing cliché lovey-dovey pictures to couples half of whom will get divorced would be even worse. This way, at least I get to work with beauty, the thing that drew me to photography in the first place.”

“Don't forget about the poor photogenic dogs used by their owners,” Carla chimes in. “You're right, this way you can at least ask the object of your exploitation for their consent.”

His eyes widen and he lets out that laugh, it's like out of a music box – Carla would crank with the handle over and over again, until it would break, just to get it out of him and be able to listen to it on loop forever.

“You're absolutely right,” he smiles, widely and astonishingly genuinely, and she realizes that her mouth is doing the same – after a day of forced, perfectly angular _curving_ of her mouth for the camera to depict, she's let it loose pretty much enough for the corners of her lips to rise up to her ears. It's not pretty, certainly. It's honest.

“Are you still too disgusted with me to hang out after we're done?”

**xiii.**

She finds him in front of the building waiting for her, eating that candy bar. She already knew that this was a stupid idea a few seconds after accepting. She hoped that he wouldn't be there, that she'd be able to leave before him and avoid _anything_. Her heart also gave three ragged, excited and _happy_ beats when she saw him on the stairs, head turned slightly away, treading on the spot and kicking the edge of the step with his bulky tennis shoe.

She descends gracefully, holding the strap of her purse with one hand, her phone in the other. She doesn't really know what to do when she reaches the bottom and they're on the same level, his gaze cheerful and fleeting and his motions flickery and clumsy as he offers to take her sports bag with her outfits that she has on the other shoulder.

“So, what did you have in mind?” she asks _clumsily_ herself, handing him her luggage, suddenly very aware of the fact that the young, handsome photographer Samuel is going out with her after work, on something that some nosy and impolite people would definitely interpret as a _date._

It's scary that she doesn't even mind.

**xiv.**

If he's trying to be as horrible of a date to crush her expectations just so that she'll be more impressed at some super-romantic second part with flowers and music and, she doesn't know, stargazing or something, he's doing a good job. Carla can't hide her annoyance – doesn't try to, anyways – when he walks into a McDonald's. She doesn't even speak when he orders himself a burger and fries and a chocolate milkshake – she just makes the tiniest move with her eyebrow. That's how redundant it is.

“I'm a model, you know,” she can't help herself, when she sits across him by the green table covered in long-lasting foil and almost tastes the grease through her nose.

“So?”

Her eyebrow flies up a mile high, now. “ _So?_ ”

He _chuckles_. Now, she's for the notion that he doesn't see it as a date at all – maybe he just thought it'd be too pathetic to eat alone at the crappiest fastfood chain there is, among obnoxiously loud families, obese couples and cursing teenagers. Maybe he made a bet with someone that he'd get the gorgeous frigid antisocial ice-queen to go out with him, or that he'd make the invincible dieter who goes to the gym ten times a week eat a french fry. Carla won't give him the satisfaction in either field.

“If this is your idea of a fun afternoon, I'm hoing home,” she announces coldly, her disappointment only confined in a very isolated part of her body. Maybe it all concentrates into her pinky, and the finger will rot and fall off when she goes to the gym and almost makes herself sick from exhaustion, and then she'll go home fingerless and make herself a salad with thirty grams of quinoa and fifty grams of lemon salmon.

“You really think so lowly of me. You'd miss the best part,” he speaks teasingly, but they both know that he twitched when she threatened to leave, and it definitely makes Carla happy. Not as happy as when he extends his arm over the very narrow table – the economy of fastfood establishments – and gently strokes her shoulder. “Stay. I'm sorry, I was dead hungry and really needed to eat, and this is cheap and, well, close, but I am definitely not so lame to take a girl on a date to McDonald's.”

“Oh, this is a _date_ , then,” she acts. It's probably a bit too over the top; she still has to keep up her appearance. “I didn't know that.”

Samuel doesn't call her out on the lie; she doesn't know whether he genuinely believed her, chose to be nice or was too nervous. Anyways, it's not even a lie, because _she_ was insecure about it, which makes the situation very bad for her – she's allowed herself to be dependent, needy, _not in control_.

And she's waiting for Samuel to finish his food, and all the sodium and fat and carbohydrates are attacking her senses. It's like her own Siege of Leningrad, her being the city, encircled from all sides.

“Are you really not hungry?” he asks. If that isn't the last drop for her patience, she isn't sure what will be.

And when she shakes her head absently, her body betrays her and gives in and her stomach rumbles.

“Carla,” he lowers his chin, giving her a somewhat serious look, but she can't start defending herself or accuse him of being totally and absolutely inconsiderate, as has been on her mind throughout the whole afternoon or evening or whatever the hell the time is. She's too busy with replaying in her head how his name sounded coming from his lips. It didn't sound harsh, with the rolled hard _r_ in the middle, angular and strict and concentrated into a sharp blade that cuts through the air. Was it the first time he said her name? It sounded, as most of the things he says, delicate. Soft, yet not puffy. Creamy, but not overwhelmingly, annoyingly sticky. _Carla_. _Carla_. She tries to recreate it in her head, but she can't get quite the same effect. _Chocolatey_.

“Just take a sip.” Speak of the devil. Despite the fact that the milkshake hardly looks like chocolate, although it claims to be – it looks like food coloring and cream and sugar and then maybe thin swirls of cocoa powder.

 _Fucking god,_ she thinks when she snaps out of her embarrassing daydream and refocuses on him. He pushed the plastic cup towards her and is smiling at her. In that moment, Carla is sure that she's falling in love – what the fuck is she saying? She's not falling in love, they don't even know each other, and if he keeps this up, he doesn't have a good shot – with the world's biggest idiot.

“No, thank you,” she smiles stiffly. “I don't like milkshakes.”

“I can buy you something else-”

“Fucking shit,” she finally loses her patience, “I really don't know if you're retarded so that I have to say it explicitly, but I'm a model in the middle of a season, and I definitely can't eat fucking McDonald's, not to mention that I don't want to. It's cheap and unhealthy and gross.”

She really does expect him to apologize, pack up his leftovers and throw them into the garbage, and then finally leave the godforsaken place, but he shakes his head in the smallest motion and his lips get stuck precisely in the position between a small smile and a completely neutral expression. “One sip won't kill you.”

Carla's already thinking about how many calories there might be in one sip – seventy? If the whole thing has circa seven hundred, is a sip a tenth, or more, or less? But what if the drink has more? It's a dangerous path and she has to remind herself sharply.

“I'm not gonna drink your fucking milkshake,” she hopes that she was finally annoyed enough for him to drop it.

“I'm gonna take the rest with me if you change your mind,” he says.

**xv.**

The plastic cup in his hand continues to annoy her throughout their whole outing – it really is a shame, because the small photogallery he takes her to really is exquisite, and Carla doesn't have to have a liberal arts degree to be awed by the way that the artist has used light and shadow to create eloquent ornaments out of bodies, men's and women's, but all naked and smooth and glistening, positioned in front of white walls.

She'd love to admire the art in peace, and she'd love to laugh at Samuel's crappy jokes from time to time, listen to his lectures about how the photographer has achieved one or another effect – she has no idea what adjusting the ISO does, or what it really means, but she just likes listening to Samuel's gleamy voice rise to somewhat excited when he talks about it – but the little scratches of his nails against the dumb cup are driving her insane.

“Just throw it away,” she interrupts him in the middle of one of his lessons about god-knows-what.

“What?”

“You shouldn't have food in a gallery, anyways,” she remarks defensively, too much so.

“This is my friend's place, I literally helped paint the walls with paint from the home-craft store,” he grins. “It's not exactly upsale.”

“Just get rid of it.” She doesn't know why she's so insistent and she doesn't know why she's _this_ irritated; the truth is, she is aware how irrational and straight up annoying she is being, but she can't seem to drop it.

“I'm not gonna waste food,” his moralizing side comes out again.

“Fucking god, Samuel, just get rid of that damn milkshake! It's so fattening and unhealthy that it belongs in the trash anyway!”

He lifts his eyebrows, gives her a look and goes to the hallway to find a garbage can.

“I didn't know you were one of those,” he says when he comes back, plastic-cup-less.

“One of whom?” she asks dangerously.

“One of the crazy psychotic can't-be-around-food-because-even-breathing-it-in-will-make-me-fat ones,” he says, ignoring the warning signs.

**xvi.**

_I'm sorry,_ he texts her a few hours later. _I was a jerk._

Carla doesn't respond, because she's pissed. Also because she's too tired after running on the treadmill until she's burned six hundred calories. Lu has been locked in the bathroom for way too long, so Carla lies on her bed unshowered in a sports bra, with sweat-gone-cold all over her body and ponders whether there really is something wrong with her.

She gets her usual non-fat greek yogurt the next morning, adds half a banana and seven almonds, drinks her half-litre glass of lemon water and decides that there isn't. She's a model, after all; it's a part of her job, the lifestyle that she has to lead in order to be good at it, in order to show that she isn't just a part of the useless golden youth feeding off their parents' money. No, Carla is independent. Which means that she has a rent to pay. Which means that she has to stay skinny and pretty.

And if Samuel doesn't understand that, he can go suck his ass.

**xvii.**

After her not sparing him a gaze for the remaining two days of shoots that he does, ignoring his texts and then blocking him after they got too annoying and she got too tempted, and especially after she's obnoxiously made out with a random guy at a party right under Samuel's nose, Carla thinks that her message was clear enough.

Apparently, it was not; she hears him on the other side of the home phone with which you let people in after they've rung the doorbell. She should've known better before picking up; who even rings doorbells these days, anyways?

Only creeps.

“Carla, I'm really sorry about what I said, but please, could you just talk to me? I really like you, and I just need a chance to-”

“Who is this?” she plays for time and contemplates how the fuck he found out where she lived.

“Samuel,” he rushes even more, the phone giving him three merciless beeps before his time runs out – they have ten seconds, nine, eight. “Carla, I'm sorry, please, would you-”

The silence that follows is deafening, and it only takes Carla a frustrated sigh and a quick search for her keys before she slips into her sandals and runs out of the door.

**xviii.**

“Would you enlighten me about the stalking methods you used to get to my apartment so that I can protect myself from any future predators?” she asks. They're walking by the river and the cold breeze combined with the uncharacteristically overcast weather caused her to shiver – so she's wearing his jacket, naturally. She had to muster every bit of her self control not to twitch even the slightest when he casually put it over her shoulders as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

He laughs, of course. Carla isn't sure how she's managed to live without that laugh for that long – a week. Right now, a second without it seems like too much. “I went to the agency about some pictures I had that could be added to your portfolio and took a look at your file in their computer.”

“Hm, illegal and uncreative, I see,” she nods her head in sarcastic commendation.

“What was I supposed to do when you acted like I don't exist?” he asks, more seriously now.

“Get the memo, maybe.”

He ignores the bitterness, grabs her hand and forces her to stop. His eyes – well, they're a problem, Carla already knew that, but this time, their overwhelmingly decadent richness seems somehow twenty thousand times more perilous. “Carla,” he starts. “I'm so sorry about what I said. I was an insensitive asshole – well, I still am, I guess – but I'm really sorry and I promise to shut up about your eating habits and whatever other thing that makes you uncomfortable to talk about if you just give me a chance, because I really like you and you're kind of the only thing that's giving me a reason to live right now, so, please, forgive me.”

They're quietly staring at each other and Carla is hyper-aware of his palm getting sludgy and sweaty while hers is still cold as ice in his embrace.

“That was theatrical,” she says when her hand literally feels as if it was swallowed by an overly-salivating dog, and pulls it away. “And yeah, I forgive you.”

She's not sure how he manages to have a thousand golden fireworks explode in his irises, but he does, and she wants to drown in them. “So, do you wanna – go out with me again?”

“Aren't we out right now?” She's had enough experience with going against all her instincts – she's been doing it her whole life, after all – so it's not too difficult for her to make him suffer a little more.

“I know a spot. It's like a lookout kinda thing,” he explains, a bit rushed and a bit nervous and clicky again, and she bites her lip but can't suppress the smile this time.

“Sure,” she says, and is just glad that he's had the intellect not to take her out to eat.

**xix.**

Carla doesn't tease him about the girly cliché that the violently violet, radiantly red and overpoweringly orange sunset they watch is (and as if that wasn't enough, the railing by the edge of the hill he's brought her to has _love locks_ on it, for god's sake); she is only capable of staring in awe.

There's something irony-cancelling about watching a pretty sunset with a pretty guy's arm over her shoulders.

“Do you like it?” he asks, she lifts up her eyes and smiles at him, softly yet genuinely.

She thinks her look says it all, but apparently, he really has a thick skull and she sees an undertone of worry light up in his eyes, they seem to stop reflecting the warmer tones and get invaded with bluer and darker shins, so she whispers: “It's lovely.”

When he kisses her, tender and unsure and scared, he sets on their own aurora inbetween their lips. Blue bliss, purple passion and red rouse – and relief. It's both. Carla is simultaneously the most antsy and peaceful that she's been in weeks.

She doesn't think at all about the kitsch of it nor how many girls he must've brought over there already.

These thoughts come at night, when she's turning over and over again in her bed, but instead of critiquing every second of their moment, she can't stop thinking about the sound of his voice or the _look_ he gave her immediately after they kissed – the golden-lit grin with just a tad of smugness – and instead of trying to drive them out, she takes them in, inhales deeply, fills her lungs with elation, and smiles into the ceiling without having the slightest desire to fall asleep and lose the feeling.

“You're being in love so loudly that I can hear it,” Lu rises her voice from over their paper-thin wall – their beds are divided by exactly 20 centimetres of plasterboard – and Carla sinks into her mattress and almost feels tears of happiness form in her eyes because it feels like her body is overflowing with joy.

She doesn't know if she's ever felt too much happiness that she couldn't contain it.

**xx.**

Carla doesn't remember the sensation of falling in love, because she has never experienced it.

She remembers _being in love_ , or, more accurately, _loving_ – loving since the first step of the way.

She isn't sure whether their mothers forced her and Polo's little, chubby, three-year-old hands to fall into one another at recess in their private nursery, but she wouldn't doubt it for a second if someone told her that it was, in fact, exactly what happened.

Polo and Carla were predetermined to love each other – it was always simply so, an abiding stability in her life. Their wedding took place at five years old, with plasticky red wedding rings with candy pacifiers on them instead of the twenty-four karat gold with diamonds that Polo's mother had gotten made when they were twelve, a copy of her own most exquisite symbol of bind. Imprisonment.

Polo was from _before_ , though, from before she danced her way into the spotlight.

She doesn't really blame him for not keeping up, when he was living in a world of house parties in ivory-coloured mansions after sufferring whole mundane days, one after another, at the private school they went to, and she was living in a world of skipping dinners and flying first class to Milan with work, and excuses from school provided by the agency.

“Why don't you quit?” he'd ask her in the rare moments when they'd see each other, mostly spent in his bed. His lips would brush against her neck while he was sniveling about her absences.

How could Carla possibly explain to him that in a world where everyone knows her for her parents' money, she likes to be somewhere where she is her own? Or, perhaps not her own completely, because she is her beauty, and, by extent, those are only genes inherited from her parents, too, but nobody treats it as such.

Sure, she doesn't have a value apart from being young, thin and beautifully symmetrical, but at least that value is her own.

But Carla couldn't tell Polo that, because he was known for his parents' money, and he seemed to quite enjoy it. Really, she doesn't blame him when her answers to the question would be less-than-convincing half-truths.

She does blame him for cheating on her. That's on him.

In an especially cruel way, because she had no way of knowing what happened at those ecstasy-lined and cocktail-swamped high school parties he went to while she was standing in freezing audition rooms in black underwear. In retrospect, she should've known.

It was just that she had incorrectly assumed that just like she had been saying no to all the male models and non-gay stylists and some of the more courageous prominent spectators at runway shows, becoming so infamous for her _I have a boyfriend_ that she became somewhat of a legend and they stopped asking her after a few months, Polo had been doing the same.

He hadn't. As infuriated and humiliated as she was, she still kind of understands it.

Not everyone can have the same iron will as Carla Rosón Caleruega.

**xxi.**

She is on the verge of texting Samuel in the morning – something she _never_ does – but she finds out that he beat her to it, and Lu throws a piece of a rice cake at her grinning over the phone. “God, Carla, this is such a bad cliché.”

Carla ignores her, responds that she's free on the weekend, debates sending a heart, deletes and types it again two million times altrenating between six different colours, decides against it and takes a defensive bite of her apple.

“I mean, seriously, how many girls do you think he's tried with? A young hot photographer, for fuck's sake, you'll be glad if you make into the first ten. By the order of chronology _and_ quality.”

“Why don't you concentrate on getting your measurements down to your alleged ones before that shoot you have next Wednesday instead of getting into my business,” she goes for a low blow, ignores Lu's only quarter-pretended gasp of hurt and slams her bedroom door behind her.

She knows that being angry at Lu the one time she actually spoke the ugly truth instead of her normal uglier caricature of it isn't fair, but her rationale seems to have flown out of the window when a certain brunet came in.

**xxii.**  
They text before the weekend comes; an activity unusual for Carla since she was a fifteen-year old freshman, has gotten her individual plan at school and gone off to the big world. What were texts good for, if her class group was buzzing with party gossip that she knew nothing about, and her friends' vague questions about _how it is_ couldn't be answered in a way that wouldn't make them jealous or pitying? (Jealousy was her choice, until she stopped replying altogether and her phone fell silent for most of the time.)

She feels like she's in seventh grade when she worries about the perfectly balanced sentence structures and diction that won't make her look weird, clingy or cringey, about the amount of emojis she should use and whether diacritics make it all better or worse.

 _I can't wait to see you,_ he writes with a blue heart after, and Carla pushes her hands over her mouth and unsatisfactorily muffles a squeak. God, she really is acting like she's thirteen instead of twenty-one in a month.

When Lu announces that she's going to Barcelona for the weekend, Carla missing the reason and only providing an absent nod, Lu gives her a condescending stare and mutters: “Of course you don't give a shit. You only care about your boyfriend now.”

Instead of trying to fix things with her only close friend, Carla draws C+S on the backside of a check from the supermarket and encircles it in a heart.

Oh god, she really _is_ pathetic.

 _Lu won't be here, you can come over,_ she texts, and doesn't care at all that she's pathetic _and_ easy.

**xxiii.**

He greets her with a kiss on the lips and if she had decided not to be so embarrassingly obviously head-over-heels for him before, _that_ momentarily shreds her plan into pieces.

“I couldn't wait to see you,” he says next, and it's extremely bad how quickly she turns into a puddle of honey.

“Me neither,” she responds – she even _sounds_ like she's thirteen – high-pitched and giggly and elated.

He kisses her again, pulling her closer by the waist, and Carla bites _his_ lip and parts _her_ lips much too soon and realizes that she has a terrifying, enormous problem.

“Aren't we going out?” he asks, already breathing heavier, as she goes for his t-shirt and tries to get him to lift up his arms so that she can throw it over his head.

“Later,” she says, already delusional with want. “ _Please_.”

As she's said, it's a real problem.

“Carla,” he says tenderly and slowly and beautifully and stops playing with the belt of her denim shorts for a short time, looks into her eyes and the time stops. “Are you sure?”

“I'm not gonna sue you for abuse of power, if you're worried about that,” she snaps impatiently but laughs afterwards. “Help me get my shorts off, I'm _very_ sure.”

He laughs in response, fortunately decides that he's had enough jokes a split-second after, picks her up to wrap her legs around him and carries her over to the bedroom while their tongues dance and battle each other.

“Carla,” he says next, on top of her on her bed. It's not creamy, it's sharp; it's that chocolate with chilli.

She stares into his eyes and wonders how beautiful someone has to be to make her explode into pieces.

“Samuel,” she moans in response, his hand finally getting its way into her shorts.

She can just say that after months, it feels more amazing than anything she's ever experienced. Also, she knows for a fact that it isn't just because of the hiatus.

**xxiv.**

Being with Samuel is so, so easy. It's automatic touches and comfortable silences and gentle jokes and always having someone to turn to; it's all that Carla hasn't realized she was missing until she found it. It's laughs and waiting for each other in town after either of them is done with a gig, it's the ability to lean in and just kiss, whenever and wherever, it's his eyes being just hers, it's his smile and her name sounding precious from his lips.

It's discussing fashion and photography and inside jokes and waking up warm, it's going through his hair and messing it up even more, it's late night conversations about anything and everything. He tells her about his childhood – shy kid at a bad neighbourhood school with a talent for art, a stipend program his teacher recommended him to; it was getting out of the circle that his poverty-stricken friends are in, of alcohol and dirt and petty thefts and dissatisfaction from all of it.

 _Her_ childhood was dissatisfaction stemming from strict customs and forced smiles and emotional unavailability, turned into cocaine snorted off mahogany tables, champagne at corporate parties at thirteen just slightly out of sight from their _very important_ parents; it was boredom and being condescending to hide their own misery.

Her way out of it was just _getting out_.

They're more similar than different.

Being with Samuel is being introduced to his friends – who are all sorts of people, aspiring actors and mediocrily succesful band singers and big start-up managers and state university students; Carla doesn't feel out of place _once_ , because there is not a stencil, nobody is similar to each other unlike the friends she used to have in school or her acquaintances from the modelling world – they were all the exact same kind. Every little deviation was to be concealed, gotten rid of, not to be mentioned. No, she doesn't have to fit into anything. She has a bunch of people who are just there for her to talk to without anything particular connecting them, which eliminates any sort of binds or responsibilities or hidden motives.

It's easy, almost _too_ easy.

It's also really fucking complicated.

**xxv.**

Social outings include food. They also include the expectations of everyone _eating_ – the real problem.

Whether she's with Samuel and his friends at a fancy restaurant, sketchy pub, having picnic at a park or asian food from a stand, it's extremely awkward to watch everyone eat without doing so on her own.

So, she starts eating. First, she tries to ignore it – she eats less than the others, obviously, and she fools herself into thinking that having a beer and a few fries, a salad full of dressing and hidden oil from the roasted chicken, half a portion of noodles, fish and potatoes or whatever else for dinner is absolutely normal and fine.

If the look into a mirror after a full _week_ of this doesn't make it clear that it's definitely not sustainable and absolutely not _fine_ , a meeting at the agency definitely does.

Pursed lips, two centimetres up on the waist measurement and half on the thighs, and not getting a callback are just the final straw for Carla to snap out of it.

That doesn't mean that she knows what to do. Starting not to eat again produces questions (and concern from Samuel); eating produces disappointment and lowers income.

She stops eating her usual breakfast (minus 200 calories) and then eventually only eats around people, but not having a structure messes up her digestion and she's bloated from all the sodium and grease anyways.

For the first time in her life, Carla seriously considers making herself throw up. Fortunately, she has enough of a bad example living next to her and a congenital aversion towards cheating of any kind – so she goes her own way.

**xxvi.**

When thirteen-year-old Carla stepped foot into an agency after being scouted on instagram, she had a chocolate bar in her hand.

She was flat-chested, skinny and plainly pretty, as everyone called her. She had green eyes and blonde hair that waved a little if she slept with it wet; she was subject to many compliments on her instagram posts and not much else, because she had had Polo ever before she could have decided to have him.

But she was tall for her age, recently has undergone a growth spurt, and when the message that looked legitimate enough to her, came, she saw her life flash right in front of her eyes. _You could have a really big future. Traveling, opportunities, independence. All with absolutely no financial strain on you – all expenses would be covered and then taken back from first profits. Contract would be negotiated._ As if Carla needed money.

Despite that, she answered and got a reply to come in with her parents to arrange the shooting of her first headshots and the contract.

Of course, when Carla came to her parents, they found her an exclusive-for-riches modeling agency with headquarters in a renaissance palace; when she came in with her mum by her hand, she was given a chocolate bar as if it was an event to be celebrated.

It was a sea salt ecuadorian 87% organic chocolate with a cherry undertone, but that didn't stop the woman who lead them to the room for her interview from looking her up and down and stating: “Models don't eat _chocolate_.”

Her mother urgently started explaining that it was “organic, natural ingredients, a one-at-a-time treat for a special occasion and that Carla was a skinny child who didn't need to diet,” her face already gone red with fury at someone who dared to discredit her parenting style.

The woman, without missing a beat, scoffed: “Did you really think that giving your child sweets before going to a modelling agency was a good idea?” Then, she turned to Carla and pierced through her skin, making her shiver: “And what about you, can't you think for yourself? If you do _this_ , you'll be on your own.”

Carla swallowed, quickly packed her chocolate bar that she'd only eaten two bites of into her white Louis Vuitton purse, and had an epiphany. She threw the chocolate in the first garbage can when they got out into the street with a preliminary date for her first book shoot.

The fights that ensued at home after the encounter, her mother obviously deeply offended and resolutely opinionated on her doing anything with these people (“and why do you need this, Carla? We give you everything you need, why would you give yourself the trouble?”) were definitely unpleasant, but Carla eventually got her way.

She knew that it wouldn't be a walk through a garden of roses, something extremely fun nor would improve her quality of life, socially, economically, or in any other way.

Yet, she would be doing something on her own.

The first photoshoot was all hers. Her mum only dropped her off and nobody asked Carla about her at all.

It was an ecstatic feeling of liberty. Carla was always a daughter of her parents, the CEO and the actress (yes, that was her mum; however, she was one of those people who wanted a _normal childhood_ _for her daughter, out of the spotlight_ – as if that was possible, not out of the spotlight, but _normal_ ).

Once Carla was fifteen and able to work more intensively and travel abroad, she did. She moved out into the city at eighteen, paid her own rent and food and _everything_ and finally wasn't the daughter of Beatriz Caleruega, the TV star, or Teo Rosón, the telecommunication giant.

She was a model, a shallow epitome of beauty, and although it wasn't an ideal configuration, it was twenty times better being a pretty face and ideal body of Carla Rosón Caleruega instead of a kind-of-pretty daughter of successful people that nobody would spare a second glance for.

**xxvii.**

Another dinner with Samuel and his friends – Miguel and Ana, Miguel being the photographer to whose gallery Samuel had taken her and Ana being his girlfriend, a professional dancer, and in the half of his photos – takes place at a modern posh-hipsterish restaurant. Carla orders a goat cheese salad – she estimates six hundred, two hundred eighty for the insane amount of goat cheese, eighty for the pickled beetroot, a hundred for the honey, thirty for the balsamic vinaigrette, fifty for the ruccola and then the rest just to round it up, because people get a tendency to put oil into everything without saying – and asks for a water, but they force her to get a beer because “it's what they came for,” the bottle doesn't have nutritional info and Carla wants to scream. She sips her beer slowly, feeling herself lose control, succumbing to its wonderful effect – the panicky thoughts about her audition in two days and the lack of offers she's started to feel blend with the tangle of secondary thoughts in the back of her brain.

She gets drunk and happy, runs with Samuel through the lit-up streets, they climb over a fence to a kids' playground, swing on the wings, kiss on the slide and laugh and then fall on their backs into the sandbox and stare at the sky, star-less due to light pollution and smog.

She concentrates on the stars in his eyes, then, glittering and bright and beautiful, turns her head over, gently cups his face to turn his head to the side and kisses him, their cheeks pressed to the sand.

 _I never want this to end_ , she thinks. They have grains of sand in their mouths and she doesn't care in the slightest, but then one crunches in his mouth against his tooth and they pull away and giggle, eyes glistening though the dark.

“I love you,” she says.

She catches him off-guard; and herself. Despite of that, she is absolutely sure she means it, and gives his shoulder a gentle stroke when he pensievely studies her appearance to deduce to what extent she has been affected by intoxication.

“You don't have to say anything, but I promise I'm not just saying it because I'm drunk,” she whispers.

“I love you too,” he doesn't miss a beat, and Carla is sure her heart has exploded. It's made of sand and the particles started whirling across her whole body, making her impossibly quivery. “And even if you're just saying it because you're drunk, I'm not, and I mean it.”

“I'll tell you tomorrow, then,” she says.

They go to her place, try not to wake Lu up by stumbling and talking, and have tired, drunken sex, during which she tells him again.

Then she listens to his breaths get regular and feels his chest sink and rise periodically, waits enough so that he's deep in his sleep and she's almost completely sobered up, walks on her tiptoes to the treadmill in the living room and does her quick mental math.

With her two hundred calorie breakfast and two hundred calorie lunch that she's accustomed to having, she provides herself four hundred calories from dinner that she doesn't have to burn off. She used to do eight hundred, then six, but really, those greasy take-out things and alcohol don't sit the same with her body as her normal balanced meals, when she'd have 1200 a day that she wouldn't have to burn off by exercise. Maybe it's because she doesn't estimate the calories correctly, because she can't control her ingredients nor their amounts and is left to guessing; anyways, this new order just _works_. She only burned one hundred and fifty during her morning workout, because she had to leave for a meeting and slept in too late, and she can subtract fifty for the sex. That leaves her with four hundred that she has to burn off, the estimation of exactly the two beers that she was forced into. Had she had her water, this wouldn't have been necessary.

It's not like Carla to complain, though; this is just what has to be done. She turns on her treadmill, checks the door is closed, puts on her tennis shoes she leaves by the machine and runs.

She does six hundred, just to make sure.

**xxviii.**

_Can I see you today? Are you already done with your meeting?_

_Yeah, but I'm super tired,_ she responds. _Sorry._

 _I can just come to your place,_ he writes back immediately. _We don't have to do anything, I just want to see you._

She's about to send her _okay_ when his next message stops her.

_I'll bring over some food if you're so tired, it'll pick you up._

“I'm tired _because_ of your stupid food,” she mutters under her breath. Lu, sitting on the other side of the couch, snorts. Carla isn't sure why they stay in the same room when they're currently not on good terms and don't speak to each other, merely acknowledging each other's presence by casual displays of annoyance, but it's just what they do.

 _Lu is salty. She thinks that I don't make enough time for her and only hang out with you, so it's probably best if you don't come here,_ she doesn't need to lie.

 _We can hang out together. You know that I'm irresistibly charming, she'll love me so much that you'll be scared she'll steal me from you._ He sends a winking emoji. Carla grins and instantly feels bad. She _wants to_ see him. She just can't do another treadmill and HIIT session at three in the morning tonight – she's done four in the past week. She feels like she's dying.

 _Okay, but don't bring any food,_ she texts back. The three little furiously sinking-and-rising bubbles undoubtedly contain a draft of _you need to eat_ or something along these lines, so she types frantically before he'll manage to let them out into the digital open. _I wanna cook for you._

_Won't it be better if I pick something up? I mean, aren't you too tired to cook?_

_Never for you,_ she says. It's not a lie, but it's not the truth, either.

**xxix.**

Carla has been feeling like she is going to collapse for the past five days, week, two weeks? Time seems like a blur. She's cold and her nails are purple and her hair is falling out and her bones make the creepiest sounds whenever she moves.

It's a relief that after her first minute on the treadmill – she told herself to only do half an hour today, no matter how much she has left, because she is trembling and weak and _done_ – she has stopped feeling _everything_.

Naturally, the cadence of her steps picks up, the little screeches of rubber soles on the backwardly-going black strip being the only witnesses, because she _doesn't notice_.

She doesn't need anything, after all; only the pure bliss as the burnt calorie number gets higher and higher, 200, 205, 220 – 456.

“Carla?”

The sound makes her snap out of her robotic demeanor; her legs give out suddenly, and the next thing she feels is slipping back with the actual machine that won't stop moving unless there's an electricity outage.

She hears distantly a screeching wooden floor and a bang, denting and hollow and too close to her, on her, in her.

**xxx.**

Ice on her forehead after Samuel pushed back the bump with a tablespoon, a cup of hot tea in which she detects honey but doesn't have the energy to protest, and a furry blanket wrapped around her as she sits on the leather couch. She hates the feeling of leather against her skin, but the apartment came fully furnished.

“Carla,” Samuel starts, her already apprehensive. She knows what's coming, and she knows that neither of them is going to like it.

She doesn't try to avoid it though, not because she thinks that she wouldn't be able to get him to drop it – which is also true, but also, because-

She doesn't know why.

“Why were you on the treadmill at four in the morning?”

His question is stupid and unnecessary, because they both already know. Carla doesn't say that, either; she feels as if there is not a fiber in her being that could handle irony right now.

“Burning off excess calories,” she starts bluntly, her eyes sullen, her skin green. She sees herself in the reflection on the plasma TV; she looks abysmal. Definitely not like someone who could appear on a runway as a subject of envy. _The irony_ , she thinks. The ruthless, exhausting irony.

“I have an allowance every day,” she hears herself say, except it's not her, it's someone bleak and ghastly. “The rest, I have to burn off.”

Samuel sighs.

“I have to keep my measurements up to the standards,” she continues just to fill the silence. “It's just – how it is. It's _normal_.”

“This isn't normal,” he gives out, his voice just as broken and blank as hers. She snaps out of the limbo and concentrates on him, and realizes that he's, like her, powerless and hopeless and energyless and sad, and she realizes that it's all because of _her._ It's because he cares about her that he's in this state.

“I'm sorry,” she tastes her first tear on her tongue before it falls down her cheek.

He gives her another one of his incredulous looks, confusion and concern and _love_ underneath it all, and next thing, she's in his arms, warm and pulsing and melting the ice that she's been made of for several weeks, one that prohibited her from breathing and moving and existing without feeling like she will snap in half. She sobs into his bare shoulder and the salt of her tears mixes with the salt of his sweat.

“Carla, you don't have to apologize,” he murmurs, tracing spirals on her trembling back. “You just – you just need help.”

She doesn't have it in her anymore, the power to disagree nor to acknowledge that he's right.

Turns out that she's found her tipping point; it was not a question of circumstance for her, it was a question of _who._

“Everything's going to be fine, I promise,” he whispers against her hair lined with cold sweat. “I love you, Carla.”

She shakes even more, realizing that once she's crossed the line, there's no way back.

**xxxi.**

“Why chocolate?” he asks, and she tells him the story about the candy bar. She tells him all of her stories, actually. “The list just started growing. When someone told me that they couldn't believe I was eating a burger while being this thin, I stopped eating them. Ice-cream – well, that's not really my story, it was that Lu was having one of those low-calorie-protein shits in front of the agency once, then Angela stepped out and just snatched it out of her hand. It splattered on her shoes and – I don't know. It's just that, most things started to gain a subtext of shame overtime.”

“I get it,” he says seriously, and she frowns a little, because he _doesn't_. “Okay, not completely. But like, seeing what you go through on a daily basis – I don't doubt that it's fucking impossible to deal with without a coping mechanism. God,” he sighs defeatedly, “I hate this fucking industry.”

“I don't know anything else,” she admits, her head on his chest but her eyes staring at their bedroom ceiling with a crack right by the lamp's attachment – Carla wonders whether it'd crush her bones if it fell down on her. “I mean, there's no other thing I'm good at. If I'm not a model, I'm nobody.”

“I thought I was the one with the flair for the theatrics,” he chimes in lightheartedly, his lip curling up a little, hers not following his suite. He tones it down, then, his face infinitely more serious but still reassuring. “Carla, you're not a model. You're Carla, and I love you for who you are, not for your job or the way you look or the way you fuck – okay, maybe a bit for the last part.”

She chuckles, but it's grim, and more for him than actually being amused. “You don't get it,” she sighs quietly and capitulatively, baring her last undiscovered piece open. “I don't know who I am without the way I look. Sometimes, I think that there's nothing inside me at all-”

He actually starts laughing, uninhibitedly and loudly. It echoes through her head and wrecks her insides. “You're just saying the stupidest bullshit ever,” he explains rushingly when she lifts her head off him and lets it sink back into a pillow, whose smooth silk – it's good for your hair not getting frizzy – can't tune out the sound of panicked insecurity echoing in her skull. “You're literally the most interesting, likeable person ever. My friends will kick me out of the group and keep you in it if we ever break up – not that it's in my plans,” he adds quickly. “I mean, it'd really suck to lose all of my friends at once.”

She tuts into his shoulder, half-playful. “Samuel, I mean it. I don't have another option for a job, and I don't wanna model plus-size, so I have to-”

“Shut up,” he interrupts her rapidly but gently, tugging a strand of her hair behind her ear. “Just shut up, Carla, you're dumb and you're perfect – except the dumb part – and I love you and you need to start believing in yourself.”

He kisses her to silence another objection. Carla lets herself be kissed and forget.

She thinks that he deserves better, someone normal and carefree and without deep wounds that they didn't even know needed to be healed.

Despite of that, she hopes that he'll choose to stay himself. Otherwise, who knows what will happen to her.

**xxxii.**

Samuel is stubborn. It's one of his defining qualities – although Carla has been trying to let the notion of every person having to have a number of predetermined, dominating character traits loose, or else she will go insane while trying to find hers (strong-willed, reserved, proud she has, so she's fine if it's three, but if she needs five, she's screwed, especially if objectively attractive doesn't apply). But Samuel is stubborn, that's just a fact, an extremely inconvenient one for that matter.

They eat together three times a day; they cook together, too, and he makes sure that Carla doesn't weigh anything or gets too close to a measuring cup. “My mum always says that by eye is the best strategy if you want a meal that tastes like home, and not like a generic bland – whatever.”

“Bullshit,” Carla chimes in, more entertained than anything, forgetting for a second about the almost-quarter of a cube of butter that she's been trying to get to the calories of since Samuel took it out of the fridge to soften, and then wondered how many grams of that will be in her part of the sauce. “I mean, if you loved that soup that tasted more like milk mixed with ginger than anything else, and definitely not pumpkin, which was what it was supposed to be, I guess you're right. It was certainly original.”

“Ginger's good for killing bacteria,” he lectures her, smitten. “I'm just trying to keep us out of the reach of the flu epidemic. Anyways, it wasn't my fault that half of the pumpkin was moldy and we couldn't use it.”

“You know, the fact that the mold isn't on the surface doesn't mean that its cells aren't inside of the other parts of the incominated food,” she shrugs her shoulders. “You're supposed to throw the whole thing away if it's started to go bad.”

“I'm not gonna throw away a perfectly good pumpkin,” he objects disbelievingly. “Anyways, were you sick after eating it? No.”

She watches him melt butter and cheese – so much fucking cheese – and broccoli on the pan. It's sizzling and full of fat and-

“Carla, breathe.”

Another one of his annoying ideas that she was forced to follow through – an _Eating Disorder Support Group_. God, it feels ridiculous to say it. She isn't an anonymous alcoholic, for god's sake.

She breathes in, though, slow and controlled. She has to admit that it helps a little.

She also has to admit that it helps a little that she's still getting booked, and that she has a side office job – Carla's English is good, a combination of a private high school education and extensive traveling, so she translates – and it also helps a little that he's next to her whenever she's feeling overwhelmed.

She stands up on her tiptoes and pecks the back of his neck gently, getting a low hum out of him as he's occupied by trying not to burn the sauce, not succeeding fully.

“I don't know what I'd do without you,” she tells him, accepting, honest.

“I don't know what I'd do without you, either,” he responds, turning away from the stove and kissing her forehead, then jumping up rapidly as he jerks off his hand from the hob. “Shit!”

Carla takes the sauce off the heat and brings him a wet towel when he's cooling down the burn under a stream of freezing water. She blows at it tenderly and gives him a warm smile, not dropping a remark about his clumsiness.

Maybe, sometimes, it's nice to depend on someone.

**xxxiii.**

Carla's birthday is exactly a month before Christmas, which a) makes it easy to remember and b) makes it easier for her to try to divert a birthday party. She hasn't really had a proper one since she was – twelve, she thinks. She never missed it; she was usually out on a job, aynways, at least these past few years.

She tells Samuel exactly that, also using the argument that they _didn't do anything for his birthday, either_ , but he shakes that off because _they'd been in the ignoring phase, remember?_

She tells him she doesn't need anything elaborate, that she doesn't need anything, really – birthdays for her are a call from her mum and a thousand euros on her bank account from her dad, a kiss on the cheek from Lu with some elaborate new trendy piece that is actually wearable on the streets, not like the things they model, and nothing much else. He asks whether it was different when she was younger, and she smiles involuntarily.

“Yeah, when I was little, like really little, like in first grade, there'd be this huge party for like all my classmates and friends from ballet and my parents' business partners' kids, of course, but anyway, there'd be balloons in the whole garden and a treasure hunt and this special kind of chocolate cake with strawberries in a french-vanilla-lime zest cream-” she stops, seeing his lip curl up. “What?”

“Nothing,” he chuckles, playing with his fingers in his lap. “Just that you were such a gourmet at six. Also, that you say you don't like your birthday, and look at yourself – you're getting secondhand excitement.”

“It was never the same when I was older,” Carla replies thoughtfully. “I don't really know when the magic just ran out, but then, my dad stopped having time and would really just give me money, balloons weren't cool anymore and the way of celebrating your birthday was to eat catered food and just _talk_ to people who brought you mediocre presents without any meaning. I got the same exact pair of diamond earrings from two different people once. Birthdays are just – not fun after you grow up.”

Samuel bites his lip, pensievely, and takes her hand in his.

**xxxiv.**

Carla wakes up on her birthday because there's somebody fucking slamming on her door with full force. “Coming!” she yells exasperatedly, but also gets out of bed quickly, because if Lu gets to the door first – well, she isn't in the mood to deal with a dead body on her birthday.

“Hey, Carla,” Ana grins. “Did I wake you up?”

“It's eight on a Saturday, what do you think,” Carla yawns, but she smiles at the sight of Samuel's – and now, her, apparently - friend outside the door. “What are you doing here?”

She scoffs harshly. Carla likes it about her – she's a dancer, tiny and small-boned and elegant, but she talks pretty much like a lumberjack. “Surprising you for your birthday, obviously. Here's your first clue,” she hands her a folded piece of paper. “And this is from me. Happy birthday!” She kisses Carla on both cheeks. “Don't open it while I'm here, if you don't like it, I'd rather spare myself the fucking embarrassment,” she laughs. “Anyways, bye. And good luck!”

 _Your next clue is in the fridge,_ stands on the note, a doodle of a chest in the corner, and Carla smiles.

She really isn't sure what she did to deserve him.

**xxxv.**

She feels much less sentimental when the scavenger hunt takes three hours. She knows that he was determined to give her a fun birthday, but this one has been _so_ _fun_ that it's been a little too much.

She's also not particularly impressed when the allegedly final clue gives her coordinates on the opposite side of the city. She might strangle him one she sees him for being way too good at birthday surprises.

After three metro transfers, she finally arrives at the designated spot, takes out her phone to look at google maps but knows where to go before they load.

There's a fluroescently yellow capital M on a banner that points you 600 meters forward.

Carla snorts, attracting a few unwanted glances from the bypassers, and sets out on her final mission. She hopes she's not wrong about this – her map has stopped loading, she must be out of data.

She is out of data. She was also right.

There are fucking balloons floating over the restaurant, she sees them from the outside, just like she sees Samuel nervously pacing along the wall.

“This is so fucking stupid,” she tells him and he jumps up because he was back to her. “I hope you didn't get one of those creepy clowns.”

“The committee brushed that proposal off the table,” he smirks. “So, does _stupid_ mean the kind of stupid you like?”

There's girlands everywhere and people with drinks – what a weird setting for a wine glass to be in – and she catches Lu and Nadia actually talking together by a table, sharing a fruit cup or something, Ana and Miguel and some of her model friends and even one guy from her high school, Ander, that she hasn't seen in ages, and she doesn't know when it is that her eyes fill with tears. “I love it,” she whispers, hugging him. “You're just- Thank you. It's amazing, Samuel.”

“I thought the memory of our tragic first date would draw a smile on your face,” Samuel chuckles. “It certainly wasn't that fun then, but now it's a fan favourite story at dinner parties.”

“Seriously?”

“Taking a model to McDonald's? Come on,” he shakes his head. “Some people have started a petition to crown me the world's biggest idiot.”

“God, I love you,” she says unprovoked, and kisses him to seal it. He seems kind of awe-struck by her blatant PDA, because she's usually not up for big shows of passion unless she's really drunk, and she prolongs the kiss as long as she can.

“So. I know that we're not in America, but what drink would you like on your twenty-first birthday?”

It takes her brain two seconds before it comes up with a perfect answer.

The chocolate milkshake is still the same disgusting mixture of cream and chemicals and molten diabetes, but it's not about what it tastes like. It's about what it represents.

The chocolate eyes that are staring at her from across the table full of happiness and _love_.

**Author's Note:**

> If anyone made it here, I am deeply impressed. Also, I'm not sure how accurate the portrayal of pretty much racism in the European modeling industry is, but honestly, I'm inclined to believe that this is one of the things I got at least vaguely right.


End file.
